KUWG General Election Guide 2015

General Election 2015 and you

By Dude Swheatie of Kwug

Decision-making basics

As Thomas Jefferson said, “Democracy presupposes knowledge.”

What do each of the parites standing in General Election 2015 stand for? (See next paragraph on that matter.) Fully active participation in UK elections also requires that you be registered to vote.(1) If you are not registered to vote by 20 April 2015 at your current address, find out what you can register to vote. And if there is not a candidate of your first choice party standing for election in your constituency, you could find out about candidates of your first choice party near you via the website of the party concerned, and do what you can to campaign for that party there as well as voting for the candidate of your closest fit in the place where you are registered to vote.

The interactive Vote for Policies website helps you decide between the biggest parties according to where you are in the UK.(2) In England, that's Conservative, Green Party of England & Wales, Labour, Liberal Democrat and United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Policies are presented without party attributes and you make your choices according to the policies more than the name of the party. Once you've completed their survey, you can view more of the policies of each party via other pages on the Vote for Policies website. You can also find out what the most popular party in your constituency is of those who have used the Vote for Policies website. Of course, if there are other parties standing for election in your constituency, you could look to their websites.

Additional info to aid you in deciding which party/ies to support:

Other Political Parties and how to identify who is standing in your parliamentary consitutency:

•  YourNextMP — UK 2015 General Election candidates, should help you identify who is standing in your parliamentary consituency and how to connect with them(3)
• Left Unity — a political party(4)
• Trade Union & Socialist Coalition (TUSC)  — a political party(5)

Be aware that with the smaller political parties, they are sometimes invited to local 'hustings' debates for parliamentary candidates but don't turn up. So in those cases, records of the hustings may make note of that fact and you need not think that the hustings host is prejudiced against that part.

Disabled people's interests and General Elections:

A pre-2010 Government installed an investment banker as welfare reform guru despite his being apparently about the fact that testing for out of waged work disabilitiy benefit Incapacity Benefit was not handled by the claimant's own general practitioner but a company contracted by the DWP. (6) (7)  That welfare reform guru David Freud became the coalition government's Welfare Reform Minister in 2010 as Lord Freud.(8)

And in line with a since-discredited USA-based health insurance company called Unum having been undemocratically installed as an adviser to UK governments on welfare reform since 1994 and not sacked since 2000 when declared purveyor of 'disability denial factories', the 'welfare reform debate' has largely centred around smear stories against benefit claimants. (9) (10)

That is all despite the UK Government of 2007 having signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People.

• Disabled People Against Cuts — DPAC General Election 2015 Manifesto: United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) must be fully implemented, promoted and enforced (11)
• Did more people with learning disabilities vote in General Election 2010?
• Why social care for people with learning difficulties must become a General Election issue
• How a jobseeker with learning disabilities is treated in 2015 

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